Telling Tales

by Melissa Katsoulis

  She called her memoir Forbidden Love and as soon as it was published in her new homeland in 2003 it became a runaway success. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold, and Norma Khouri – highly marketable, with her ravishing good looks, sympathetic tone of voice and propensity to public tears of anger over the cause of women’s rights – became an overnight star. She trawled bookshops, festivals and rallies speaking about the experiences in her book, and Australia felt blessed that she had chosen that country as a refuge from the irate Jordanians now apparently hell-bent on dispatching her as they had Dalia.

  The critical response to the book was muted in terms of its style, but the consensus was that this was one of those books that worked despite, and in a way because of, its unpolished prose. This was the grief-stricken lament of an angry young woman, determined to make her voice heard. And the story it told spoke volumes about the different lives led by women in the modern world. In an online interview with a website for reading groups, amongst which Forbidden Love was becoming hugely popular, Khouri was asked how living in a Western country had changed her. She confessed to coming round to the idea that intimacy before marriage might not be the terrible sin she had been brought up to believe it was, although she was of course still a virgin. The same interviewer asked what kinds of responses she had had from readers of Dalia’s story, and she replied, ‘shock, outrage and disgust’.

  These words would taken on a prophetic edge when, only a year after publication, her story would be exposed as a fabrication. Norma Majid Khouri Michael al-Bagain Toliopoulos left her native Jordan before her fourth birthday and, until fleeing to Australia lived the life of a suburban housewife in Chicago, married to a Greek-American with whom she had two young children.

  She had never been back to Jordan as an adult, apart from for a brief visit to secure identity papers. She barely spoke Arabic, and her mother and siblings, with whom she had grown up in Chicago, had no idea she was interested in women’s rights. In fact her mother, who was tracked down by the Sydney-based journalist Malcolm Knox after he became suspicious of Khouri, said her daughter had suddenly fled America in 2000, leaving her family distraught and missing her. Knox set out his scrupulous debunking in a Sydney Morning Herald article that had literary Australia reeling, and asking itself why it should be such a Mecca for audacious literary hoaxers.

  But even before Knox’s careful investigation, eyebrows were being raised in Jordan even before the book itself had been seen. The leader of a women’s rights organization there, Amal al-Sabbagh, had received an anonymous email from someone asking for a bank account in which to deposit a charitable donation to the anti-honour-killing cause. Apparently this person was writing a book on the subject and proposed to give away the royalties. Al-Sabbagh was not in the habit of replying to nameless correspondents asking for bank details, but when, some time later, she saw the book for herself, she knew instantly that its author was not who she said she was. Aside from topographical inconsistencies which cast doubt on Khouri ever having lived in Amman, there were cultural misunderstandings which no Jordanian would make. For one thing, the notion of a unisex hair salon such as she claimed she and Dalia ran together, was absurd – such a venture would have been entirely illegal, and would have been shut down immediately. Besides, none of the hairdressers or barbers in the city had ever heard of these two women. Then came the more serious revelation that if Dalia had indeed been killed in the way Khouri described, al-Sabbagh or one of her colleagues would likely know about it. Amman is a small city of interconnected family and social groups, and scandalous Muslim-Christian relationships resulting in death by stabbing are the sorts of things people talk about. In total, al-Sabbagh found more than seventy inaccuracies in Forbidden Love.

  Once Knox went public with all this information, it became clear that Khouri had in fact published this story before. In America, the book was called Honor Lost. She had sent the manuscript to a New York agent who had secured her a deal, but it hadn’t sold particularly well, getting lost in a slew of not-very-well-written misery memoirs and post-9/11 exposés of the ‘real’ Middle East.

  When invited by Knox and others to account for herself, she was living in very nice enclave of Bribie Island off the coast of Queensland, where she, John and the kids had a smart house with a pool. She said she was utterly appalled that anyone would question her authenticity, and flatly denied that she had ever set foot in America until the book tour for Honor Lost. She maintained that she had no family in Chicago, no husband and no children and suggested that the enraged Jordanian establishment trying to discredit her.

  Her protestations were not enough to prevent her publishers, Random House Australia, from withdrawing the book. However they still hoped to publish the sequel to Forbidden Love later that year, a book which, it was suggested, would contain some kind of revelation or confession pertaining to the hoax. The debacle was doubly embarrassing for them because their backing of Khouri had been instrumental in her being awarded an Australian visa on the basis of ‘distinguished talent’ two years previously. However by the time the Department of Immigration came to investigate her right to remain in the country, she had skipped town again, apparently back to face the music in the US. The book-length confession never came to pass.

  A final weird twist to the story comes in the form of Forbidden Lie$, the documentary Khouri agreed to take part in to ‘clear her name’ in 2007. This film, made by the Australian director Anna Broinowsky, followed Khouri back to the streets of Amman where she said the Dalia story took place. It makes for awkward viewing, as an increasingly flustered Khouri fails to find the places she seeks and displays a command of Arabic shockingly meagre for one who claims to have grown up in Jordan. At one point she admits that the person ‘Dalia’ is based on (by now she was freely admitting that she had changed names and dates to protect the identities of those involved) had in fact been shot, not stabbed, and was accused of pregnancy outside wedlock rather than being in love with a foreigner. At one point she even allows herself to be filmed being reunited with her father, who seems delighted to see her and radiated pride at the big media success his book-writing daughter has become.

  At long last, after months of unconvincing protestations, in August 2004 Norma Khouri made something akin to an admission of guilt. She appeared on the television programme A Current Affair and said she was moved to ‘apologize to all the readers, publishers and agents out there for not telling them my personal, full story’. She had, she now admitted, lived in Chicago (but had lied about it to protect her family there) and was indeed a wife and mother also known as Mrs Toliopoulos. But she maintained she had spent many years in Jordan and did indeed know a girl who was killed by her family.

  The proposed sequel to Forbidden Love is no longer scheduled for publication and for the time being at least the author has sunk back beneath the radar. The full story of why she perpetrated the first major literary hoax to be unmasked in the twenty-first century may never be known, but from what is known of her fractured immigrant family and, crucially, her inability to get that first, highly personal memoir published, it is easy to see all the hallmarks of the classic hoaxer writ large on Norma Khouri. Perhaps she thought her anger at men (and publishers) would be assuaged if she could prove her worth to them. Perhaps she was just greedy for money. Most likely it was a commixture of all those impulses and more that led her to believe that the best route to professional and personal self-worth was to take on the identity of someone who never existed. After all, she was only trying to do right by her oppressed sisters, right?

  WANDA KOOLMATRIE

  IN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES in Australia, storytelling has been the glue that binds generations since time immemorial. But only recently has the written, printed word played a part in the transmission of their culture. For the last twenty years, one of the vanguards of this new writing movement in Western Australia is Magabala Books, who work with local people and the literary establishment to nurture new writers. There are others like
them but as ill-luck would have it it was here that the pair of hoaxers calling themselves Wanda Koolmatrie sent their manuscript in 1994.

  The book was called My Own Sweet Time and announced itself as the memoir of a fifty-year-old Aboriginal woman who had been brought up by white people after being forcibly removed from her Pitjantjara mother as a baby. There is relatively little insider literature of the national scandal that was the ‘stolen generation’ – those taken from their black parents to be re-educated in white Australian culture in the first half of the twentieth century. So this book was important. Better still, it was funny.

  Wanda was a girl who would not give up. She battled on through a life lived on the margins of society – ostracized by both cultures and never able fully to identify with either – but by retaining a strong sense of self and a stiff upper lip, she never succumbed to self-pity. She spoke of the moment she realized she was different from everyone around her in the Caucasian world of suburban Adelaide but resolved not to let it get to her: ‘I’d seen my universe twisted, but I made a point of sticking to my habits.’

  Her good humour shone through the pages of what reviewers were soon calling one of the funniest books of the year, and she was not only added to a compendium of Australian literature and put on the national curriculum, but shortlisted for a number of prizes. One, the Nita May Dobbie Award, she won, taking the $5,000 prize money bequeathed annually by one of the great feminist figures of Australian literature. The happy story of one woman’s rise from criminal cross-racial adoption to mainstream literary success was, it seems, complete.

  It was only when the editors at Magabala Books sought a face to face meeting with Wanda to discuss her next book, a follow-up to her acclaimed memoir, that ‘she’ decided to unmask herself. She was, she jovially admitted, not a she at all. Nor was she Aboriginal, adopted or once married to a man called Frank Koolmatrie. The author of the book that had had literary Australia reaching for the laurels was in fact a disgruntled cab-driver from Adelaide called Leon Carmen.

  Why was Carmen disgruntled? Because, of course, he had tried and failed to get his writing published before. And why had he failed in his literary endeavours? To him the answer was obvious: because he was white.

  This might seem strange to British readers, even those who use the phrase ‘political correctness gone mad’ with a straight face. But in Australia, unlike anywhere else in the English-speaking world, there is a popular white ideology which holds that positive discrimination has made life easy for Aboriginals and impossible for whites. And this includes writers. Since it had been decided that Australia’s First Nation people had been wronged by years of social and economical abuse, so the rights-for-whites brigade says, the only way to get published as an author is to be black and preferably female and old as well.

  When Carmen outed himself in a piece in the Australian Telegraph in 1997 and gave this ethnocentric reason for his previous lack of success as a writer, he knew he would have the support of many readers and writers. And indeed letters to the press in the weeks that followed were often along the lines of this one:

  This is yet another case where mainstream Australia is subjected to racial discrimination because privilege, entitlement and opportunity are being restricted on racial grounds . . . Until this racial discrimination against mainstream Australia is abolished, I don’t see much chance of reconciliation.

  Politicians, too, weighed in with assertions like this one from the reactionary Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr (whose literary prize had in fact shortlisted Koolmatrie’s book two years before):

  This silly chasing after fashionable status in the area of Aborigine studies [sic] is only retarding the cause of better health, better education, better jobs for Aboriginal people . . . By focusing on the damage to the ‘fashionable’ publishing of indigenous work, the politically correct clique so vociferous in its condemnation of Mr Carmen has succeeded in diverting attention from the real and arguably more important issues.

  But Carmen had had support from a much closer quarter from the outset of the project: his friend the writer John Bayley. Bayley had had marginally more success as a playwright than Carmen had had as a novelist, and as a onetime member of the South Australian Writers Centre had more of an idea about how the publishing industry worked. He offered to help Carmen perpetrate his hoax, acting as his agent when sending the book off to publishers, all the time sharing and re-enforcing the view that as white men they were getting a raw deal in society and the arts. Carmen was known to be associated with the publishers of Peace Books, a far-right offshoot of the racist Adelaide Institute, and indeed it was with their help that he went on to release one final gasp of publicity in the form of his tell-all book about the hoax, Daylight Corroborree, speaking of his desire to circumvent ‘an anti-white male bias in Australian publishing’.

  Together, these two unfortunate angry men set about fooling the fashionable world of letters, just as James McAuley and Harold Stewart had done with Ern Malley in 1944. However, Carmen would have us believe that although his aim in publishing pseudonymously had the welcome effect of humiliating a publishing scene quality-blind through colour-sensitivity, there was also a deeper, more personal reason for creating the character he did: ‘I needed a charismatic narrator, someone who’d shaken difficult beginnings . . . discouragement, a few bum steers, bewilderment and doubt. Someone who refused to buckle, mope or compromise. In short, Wanda became a symbol of what I might have been myself, had I shown more courage in my youth.’

  Carmen’s youth, from what little we can know of it, was not a happy one. (He never gave revealing interviews and has now disappeared completely, reportedly having moved to Ireland.) Growing up in the uninspiring suburb of Torrens Park, Adelaide, he lost his father at the young age of fourteen and went on to join a very alternative rock band called Red Angel Panic. After a few years of playing local gigs and festivals the band failed to find success, and Carmen drifted from one low-paid job to another. After decades picking fruit, driving taxis and failing to get his writing recognized, he moved to Sydney and started to formulate the hoax that would afford him both revenge and acceptance:

  The time seemed to be ripe. Authors as personalities were attracting more attention than their books. And the publishing world seemed to be regulated by academics promoting their various hobby horses. As we delved deeper into this kind of chatter, the idea of a hoax gained ground. It seemed the only way to get into print.

  Hijacking the voice of an Aboriginal woman may have got Carmen into print, but it also got him painted as a corrupt and insensitive schemer by critics and readers from both sides of the ethnic divide. The indigenous writer Ann Heiss lamented that ‘Aboriginality had been appropriated and exploited, yet again, by a white person for the purpose of profit.’ Bruce Sims, the director of the publishing co-operative who had published My Own Sweet Time, immediately withdrew the book in disgust at what its author had done, and spoke of ‘a very elaborate web of deceit involving Carmen’s literary agent . . . Now that the facts have surfaced, [Magabala Books] condemns strongly such deception. Trust is an important part of Aboriginal culture. In this respect Magabala Books has been too trusting and fallen perhaps into the same trap as the ancestors of Australia’s indigenous peoples.’

  In the end, Carmen gave back the $5,000 in prize money he had received and, despite a police investigation into the fraudulent activities of his friend and ad-hoc agent Bayley, no criminal convictions were made. Both men have been allowed to crawl back under the rock of ignominy to observe from places of obscurity a publishing scene that will forever be more on guard for phoney Aboriginal authors. If one positive thing came out of the Wanda Koolmatrie hoax, however, it is a consensus amongst Aboriginal writers that the more con-artists try to steal their voices, the harder they will try to nurture the real voices of a new generation of native writers.

  6

  MEMOIRS

  TAKE A LOOK at the non-fiction bestseller charts and today, as ten years ago, you
will see one trend which (apart from TV tie-ins and recipe books) dominates. The tell-all autobiography. Whether the author is famous already or merely hoping to become so as a result of laying bare their struggle with addiction, abuse, illness or loss, there is a seemingly inexhaustible market for the ever more incredible memoirs of the heirs of Dave Pelzer, the American who blazed the trail with his phenomenally successful A Child Called ‘It’. Pelzer, like a more recent British exponent of the genre, Constance Briscoe, has had to face accusations from family members that his tale of childhood misery is not authentic. But those allegations pale into insignificance next to the master of the dodgy misery memoir, James Frey: his revolting, brilliantly written A Million Little Pieces fooled Oprah Winfrey and millions of others until he was forced to apologize in one of the most unforgiving trials by talk-show host ever broadcast.

  His story is instructive and says a lot about the desperation of US publishers to produce the next worst life story. But two generations earlier, amid the heady literary salons of pre-war New York, a plucky young hoaxer with an equally eye-popping tale to tell set about writing a memoir which was only marginally less outrageous than Frey’s. She called herself Joan Lowell and, although now largely forgotten, she was the true progenitor of the phoney genre that continues to strike fear into the heart of publishers everywhere.

  JOAN LOWELL

  IN NEW YORK in the 1920s there was no shortage of glamorous, independent young women who liked nothing more than to prop up bars and be bought lunches while telling outrageous stories to enthusiastic male listeners. This was the age of female pilots, female lion tamers, female sharpshooters and a host of other newly trouser-wearing, cigarette-smoking girls. One such woman was young Joan Lowell who, in 1928, was the talk of the town not only for her impressively robust physique, spirited personality and deep brown eyes, but for the wonderful tales she told about her time at sea. Apparently a very accomplished sailor and swimmer, she would from time to time give lectures about her exploits on her father’s trading vessel, the Minnie A. Caine, on which she had spent the first seventeen years of her life as the only woman on board.